Maggie Gyllenhaal will star in David Simon’s new porn drama The Deuce as Eileen Merrell AKA Candy, “a Times Square hooker and veteran with an entrepreneurial bent who is drawn into the fledgling porn industry”, according to the Hollywood Reporter.

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Gyllenhaal will join James Franco, who signed on to play twin mobsters, in early August. The show, a period drama about the porn industry in the 70s and 80s, was named after 42nd Street (the block between Seventh and Eighth Avenue was nicknamed “the Deuce”) and was inspired in part by the lives of twin brothers who became the front for mob control of the Times Square sex industry.

According to HBO, the Deuce “follows the story of the legalization and subsequent rise of the porn industry in New York from the early 1970s through the mid-1980s, exploring the rough-and-tumble world that existed in midtown Manhattan until the rise of HIV, the violence of the cocaine epidemic and the renewed real estate market all ended the bawdy turbulence”.

It is being written by Simon, the lauded creator of The Wire and, more recently, Show me a Hero, and the pilot will be directed by Game of Thrones and Breaking Bad veteran Michelle MacLaren. George Pelecanos, Nina K Noble and Richard Price, all of whom worked on The Wire, will be executive producers.

Simon has also had another project green-lighted by HBO, a currently unnamed political drama set on modern-day Capitol Hill, that he will co-produce with Watergate journalist Carl Bernstein.